Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,92

at him. FBI! Freeze, Lieutenant! Show us your hands!

He takes a decisive breath, presses the garage-door opener, and winces as the door grinds upward in the middle of the still night.

Nothing but a dark, empty driveway and a dark, empty street.

92

NEVER HAS it been more important to keep his wits about him. Never has it been more critical to drive normally—to keep the van straight, obey traffic signals, and not speed, of course, but not drive precisely at the speed limit either.

He knows the route by heart. It was part of the preparation. Avoid the highways, stick to local roads.

Two stops. The first one, thirty-five minutes away. The second, just ten minutes farther.

He rolls along through the local roads, hilly and curvy, dark and quiet. He makes it to the county road without incident—long stretches of pastures and farms, occasional gas stations. Some areas are more residential, and he passes mailboxes and sidewalks.

He turns down a broken road and heads toward the fossil-fuel generating plant closed some thirty years ago, now abandoned, looking like a massive piece of gothic lore in its loneliness and decrepitude. He drives until the road dead-ends into the plant, then continues along the remnants of the parking lot, going slowly over the battered, uneven pavement. He passes the enormous first building and drives over wild grass toward his destination behind the building.

He dug the ditch when he first arrived in Virginia, months ago; it was always part of the plan.

He stops the van and doesn’t bother with the charade of putting down the rear-door ramp; he just climbs out of the driver’s side. He shines his flashlight over the earth and is not surprised to find the ditch precisely as he left it, heaps of dirt to one side of a large piece of plywood resting on the ground.

He gets his hands under the plywood. It takes some effort with this heavy wood, but he pulls it toward himself and shuffles backward, revealing a gaping hole in the earth—a long, deep grave.

He opens the back of the van and clears space down the middle. He grabs hold of the body bag and pulls it toward him, gets the corpse in his arms. He carries it over to the grave, steadies himself so he doesn’t fall in with it, and drops the body in. It lands with a delicious whump.

He retrieves a shovel from the van and starts throwing the dirt back into the grave, on top of the body. Lucky for him, it hasn’t rained here for over a week, so the dirt is relatively workable. Still, it takes him the better part of an hour, until nearly four in the morning, to fill the grave. He pats the earth with the shovel, tamping it down as best he can. Then he moves the large piece of plywood back over the grave and returns to his car.

He has accomplished one of the two most important tasks of the night. Because this body must never be found.

Now for the second task.

Feeling considerably relieved with the body disposed of, he drives back to the county road for the next stop. It’s just a few miles up ahead.

He follows the curves of the road. He doesn’t have GPS because he doesn’t have his phone—or, rather, he does, but it’s turned off, with the SIM card removed, to avoid tracking—and, if memory serves, it’s easy to miss this turnoff if you’re not careful. It should be only about two more miles…

As he comes around a blind curve obscured by trees, he sees color in the sky. Flashing color. He hits the brakes, but he’s already around the curve before the van comes to a stop. His headlights are already shining forward. He’s already announced himself.

Less than a quarter of a mile away, squad cars spread across the road—three of them, their bar lights spraying obnoxious flashes of blue light through the darkness.

A roadblock. And it’s too late to turn back.

93

HIS PULSE hammering in his chest and throat, he eases the van forward, toward the roadblock. Not a formal one, he quickly realizes. They aren’t here for him. Not a DUI checkpoint either. A car accident. A sedan in a ditch to the right. An ambulance drives up and joins the three police cars. There’s a second vehicle spun sideways along the road, the front passenger side gashed open.

A state trooper, standing amid flares set up to block the road, notices the van and puts his hand up. The trooper